He with greater wisdom read his poems to some single friend whose judgment and candour he could trust—some Quinctilius Varus, or Maecius Tarpa—and he advised his friends the Pisos to do the same; but his advice was little heeded. Even during his lifetime the vain thirst for applause tempted many an author to submit his compositions to the hasty judgment of a fashionable assembly, and (fond hope!) to promise himself an immortality proportioned to their compliments. Ovid's muse drew her fullest inspiration from the excitements of the hall, and the poet bitterly complains in exile that now this stimulus to effort is withdrawn he has lost the power and even the desire to write. [24] Nor was it only poetry that was thus criticised; grave historians read their works before publishing them, and it is related of Claudius that on hearing the thunders of applause which were bestowed on the recitations of Servilius Nonianus, he entered the building and seated himself uninvited among the enthusiastic listeners. Under Nero, the readings, which had hitherto been a custom, became a law, that is, were upheld by legal no less than social obligations. The same is true of Domitian's reign. This ill-educated prince wished to feign an interest in literature, the more so, since Nero, whom he imitated, had really been its eager votary. Accordingly, he patronised the readings of the principal poets, and above all, of Statius. This was the golden time of recitations, or ostentationes, as they now with sarcastic justice began to be called, and Statius was their chief hero. As Juvenal tells us, he made the whole city glad when he promised a day. [25] His recitations were often held at the houses of his great friends, men like Abascantius or Glabrio, adventurers of yesterday, who had come to Rome with "chalked feet," and now had been raised by Caesar to a height whence they looked with scorn upon the scattered relics of nobility. It is these men that Statius so adroitly flatters; it is to them that he looks for countenance, for patronage, for more substantial rewards; and yet so wretched is the recompense even of the highest popularity, that Statius would have to beg his bread if he did not find a better employer in the actor and manager, Paris, who pays him handsomely for the tragedies that at each successive exhaustion of his exchequer he is fain to write for the taste of a corrupt mob. [26] But at last Statius began to see the folly of all this. He grew tired of hiring himself out to amuse, of practising the affectation of a modesty, an inspiration, an emotion he did not feel, of hearing the false plaudits of rivals who he knew carped at his verses in his absence and libelled his character, of running hither and thither over Parnassus dragging his poor muse at the heels of some selfish freedman; he was man enough and poet enough to wish to write something that would live, and so he left Rome to con over his mythological erudition amid a less exciting environment, and woo the genius of poesy where its last great master had been laid to rest.
After Statius had left Rome, the popularity of the recitations gradually decreased. No poet of equal attractiveness was left to hold them. So the ennui and disgust, which had perhaps long been smothered, now burst forth. Many people refused to attend altogether. They sent their servants, parasites, or hired applauders, while they themselves strolled in the public squares or spent the hours in the bath, and only lounged into the room at the close of the performance. Their indifference at last rejected all disguise; absence became the rule. Even Trajan's assiduous attendance could hardly bring a scanty and listless concourse to the once crowded halls. Pliny the younger, who was a finished reciter, grievously complains of the incivility shown to deserving poets. Instead of the loud cries, the uneasy motions that had attested the excitement of the hearers, nothing is heard but yawns or shuffling of the feet; a dead silence prevails. Even Pliny's gay spirits and cheerful vanity were not proof against such a reception. The "little grumblings" (indignatiunculae), of which his letters are full, attest how sorely he felt the decline of a fashion in which he was so eminently fitted to excel. And if a wealthy noble patronised by the emperor thus complains, how intolerable must have been the disappointment to the poet whose bread depended on his verses, the poet depicted by Juvenal, to whom the patron graciously lends a house, ricketty and barred up, lying at a distance from town, and lays on him the ruinous expense of carriage for benches and stalls, which after all are only half-filled!
The frenzy of public readings, then, was over; but Statius had learned his style in their midst, and country retirement could not change it. The whole of his brilliant epic savours of the lecture room. The verbal conceits, the florid ornament, the sparkling but quite untranslatable epigrams which enliven every description and give point to every speech, need only be noted in passing; for no reader of a single book of the Thebaid can fail to mark them.
This poem, which is admitted by Merivale to be faultless in epic execution, and has been glorified by the admiration of Dante, occupied the author twelve years in the composing, [27] probably from 80 to 92 A.D. Its elaborate finish bears testimony to the labour expended on it. Had Statius been content with trifles such as are sketched in the Silvae he might have been to this day a favourite and widely-read poet. As it is, the minute beauties of his epic lie buried in such a wilderness of unattractive learning and second-hand mythological reminiscence, that few care to seek them out. His mastery over the epic machinery is complete; but he fails not only in the ardour of the bard, but in the vigour of the mere narrator. His action drags heavily through the first ten books, and then is summarily finished in the last two, the accession of Creon after Oedipus's exile, his prohibition to bury Polynices, the interference of Theseus, and the death of Creon being all dismissed in fifteen hundred lines.
The two most striking features in the poem are the descriptions of battles and the similes. The former are greatly superior to those of Lucan or Silius. They have not the hideous combination of horrors of the one, nor the shadowy unreality of the other. Though hatched in the closet and not on the battle-field, a defect they share with all poets from Virgil downwards, they have sufficient verisimilitude to interest, and not sufficient reality to shock us. The similes merit still higher praise. The genius of Latin poetry was fast tending towards the epigram, and these similes are strictly epigrammatic. The artificial brevity which suggests many different lines of reminiscence at the same time is exhibited with marked success. As the simile was so assiduously cultivated by the Latin epicists and forms a distinctive feature of their style, we shall give in the appendix to this chapter a comparative table of the more important similes of the three chief epic poets. At present we shall quote only two from the Thebaid, both admirable in their way, and each exemplifying one of Statius's prominent faults or virtues. The first compares an army following its general across a river to a herd of cattle following the leading bull: [28]
"Ac velut ignotum si quando armenta per amnem
Pastor agit, stat triste pecus, procul altera tellus [29]
Omnibus, et late medius timor: ast ubi ductor
Taurus init fecitque vadum, tune mollior unda,
Tunc faciles saltus, visaeque accedere ripae."
This is elegant in style but full of ambiguities, if not experiments, in language. The words in italics are an exaggerated imitation of a mode of expression to which Virgil is prone, i.e., a psychological indication of an effect made to stand for a description of the thing. Then as to the three forced expressions of the last two lines—to say nothing of fecit vadum, which may be a pastoral term, as we say made the ford, i.e. struck it—we have the epithet mollior, which, here again in caricature of Virgil, mixes feeling with description, used for facilior in the sense of "kinder," "more obliging" (for he can hardly mean that it feels softer); faciles saltus, either the "leap across seems easier," or perhaps "the woods on the other side look less frowning;" while to add to the hyperbole, "the bank appears to come near and meet them." Three subtle combinations are thus expended where Virgil would have used one simple one.
The next simile exemplifies the use of hyperbole at its happiest, an ornament, by the way, to which Statius is specially prone. It is a very short one. [30] It compares an infant to the babe Apollo crawling on the shore of Delos:
"Talis per litora reptans
Improbus Ortygiae latus inclinabat Apollo."
This is delightful. The mischievous little god crawls near the edge of the island, and by his divine weight nearly overturns it! We should observe the gross materialism of idea which underlies this pretty picture. Not one of the Roman poets is free from this taint. To take a well-known instance from Virgil; when Aeneas gets into Charon's boat